I've talked to a lot of people about this piece of art by John Quigley - and heard just as many interpretation of what the message is.

This is what John Quigley had to say about it: "We came here to create the ‘Melting Vitruvian Man’, after Da Vinci's famous sketch of the human body, because climate change is literally eating into the body of our civilisation. When he did this sketch it was the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the dawn of this innovative age that continues to this day, but our use of fossil fuels is threatening that."

For me, it's simply a really, really, really big metaphor for the impact humans have on the climate in general, and the sea ice in particular.